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This book explores the earliest works of St. Augustine to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, one who gives questioning, uncertainty, and human limitations their due role in his theology. These early works are considered performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. It is shown that the very idiosyncrasy of Augustine’s arguments and his manner of pursuing them are of immense significance, which suggests possibilities for interpretation of the more idiosyncratic riches in his later works. The book is divided into three parts. Part I analyzes Augustine’s use of the genre of philosophical dialogue, why he may have chosen the genre, and what he achieves with it. Part II discusses the roles played by Augustine’s mother. Part III focuses on the dialogue, the Soliloquia.

This book articulates a Christian theology of the body in light of both the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and the ethical concerns of feminism. In conversation with Augustine and Calvin, the book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of their theologies of the body and shows how the Christian tradition contains resources for conceptualizing a theology of the body as it coheres with resurrection doctrine. Beginning with eschatology, rather than creation, allows the book to address the disorder of bodies under the condition of sin while offering a constructive proposal for understanding the redeemed body through Christology. The book proposes a grammar in which human psychosomatic unity becomes the conceptual basis for sanctification. Using gender as an illustration, it interrogates the difference resurrection doctrine makes for holiness. The last part of the book suggests that access to human bodies comes through the body of Jesus Christ. Because death has been overcome in his resurrected body, human embodiment can bear witness to the Triune God.

Augustine is a pivotal figure in the history of the concept of will, but what is his ‘theory of will’? This book investigates Augustine’s use of ‘will’ in one particular context, his dialogue On Free Choice of the Will, taking seriously its historical and philosophical form. First, it finds that the dialogical nature of On Free Choice of the Will has been missed, as exemplified by the unhistorical and misleading modern attributions of names to the speakers. Secondly, the commonplace that Augustine changed his mind in the course of its composition is shown to be unfounded, and a case is made for its argumentative coherence. Thirdly, it is shown that it is the form and structure of On Free Choice of the Will that give philosophical content to Augustine’s theory of will. The dialogue constitutes a ‘way in to the will’ that itself instantiates a concept of will. At the heart of this structure is a particular argument that depends on an appeal to a first-person perspective, which ties the vocabulary of will to a concept of freedom and responsibility. This appeal is significantly similar to other arguments deployed by Augustine which are significantly similar to Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think therefore I am’. The book goes on to investigate how Augustine’s ‘way in’ relates to these cogito-like arguments as they occur in Augustine’s major and most read works, the Confessions, the City of God, and On the Trinity. The relationship of Augustine’s to Descartes’ ‘cogito’ is also discussed. Augustine elucidates, within a particular Platonic theory of knowledge, a ‘theory of will’ that is grounded in a ‘way in’, which takes the conditions and limits of knowledge seriously.

This book considers two basic questions: how can we live well in the face of death?; and when, if ever, is it legitimate deliberately to bring human life to an end? It does so by considering the distinct theological approaches to death shown by four outstanding Christian thinkers: Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Rahner. These philosophers' thoughts constitute a single extended argument on the theology of death which can be set out in relation to the practical realities of grief, fear, and hope in the face of death. There is a rightful place for grief, a good grief, even for a Christian. Augustine teaches us that death is something with which we have to contend, and indeed that the difficult and painful process of contending with death is a means through which we are brought to our final joyful end. A key point for Thomas Aquinas is that, in itself, it is always wrong to kill a human being on account of the dignity of human nature. Rahner adds that it also stands in contradiction to the supernatural destiny of human beings. Rahner is at his most profound in describing how the need to surrender oneself to God in death is anticipated throughout life. The aim of this book is not primarily to make a contribution to the knowledge of the history of theology, but rather, through engagement with the thought of theologians of the past, to reflect on some of the practical and existential issues that the approach of death presents for us.

What is the meaning of the word ‘grace’? Can Wittgenstein's maxim that the meaning of a word is its usage help explicate the claims that Christians have made about grace? When Christians use the word, they reference within language the point of contact between humanity and the divine. This book suggests that grace is not an occult object but rather an insight, a moment when we perceive God to be active on our behalf. The book examines the biblical evidence that grace begins as a recognition of God's favour, before considering Augustine as the theologian who champions history rather than nature as the place of encounter with grace. Aquinas' work on grace is also explored, retrieving the saint's thought on three seminal concepts: nature, form, and the striving intellect. Overall, the book suggests that grace is the perception of a form, an awareness that the human person is being addressed by the world itself.

Marriage and singleness appear in the contemporary era as problems for scholars and laypeople alike. Several problems related to marriage and singleness include questions of gender roles, the nature of public and private, and sexual ethics. Many contemporary theologians focus almost exclusively on “theology of marriage” and offer solutions using sociopolitical means, but they fail to see the damage that this limited focus on marriage alone has for ecclesiology.

Augustine of Hippo becomes a reference point for addressing this split between married and single people, as well as questions about gender and public/private distinctions. This book argues that Augustine's theological method shows a better way of thinking through some contemporary problems by demonstrating how Augustine views marriage and single states of life in light of the church's life and history.

Via retelling salvation history (creation, fall, redemption, and eschatology) and taking a look at the political life of the church in its worship practices, this book shows that marriage and singleness cannot be intelligibly separated from each other, that gender and gendered relationships must be seen in light of friendship with God, and that the marriage between Christ and the church is the first mediator in any state of life. The water of baptism, Christians' first birth and initiation into the life of Christ, becomes the primary standard for relationships, rather than familial ties.

Gregory of Nazianzus has long been regarded as the premier teacher on the Holy Trinity in Eastern Christianity. Yet, ironically, for over a century historians and theologians have neglected his work in favor of his fellow Cappadocians Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, while Gregory has long been overshadowed in the West by Augustine. Christopher Beeley's groundbreaking study—the first comprehensive treatment in modern scholarship—examines Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine within the full range of his theological and practical vision. Following an introductory orientation to Gregory's life and theological works, the book traces Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine through a wide range of concerns, from biblical interpretation and language theory to the practicalities of Christian worship, asceticism, and pastoral ministry. It highlights the soteriological nature of Gregory's doctrine, which seamlessly integrates what have more recently been distinguished as dogmatic and ascetical, or doxological and systematic, theology. Unique among modern studies, this book examines Gregory's doctrine across his entire corpus of orations, poems, and letters, giving special attention to its highly rhetorical and contextualized form. It offers new insights in many areas and a major reinterpretation of the famous Theological Orations and Christological epistles (Ep. 101‐102, 202). By comparing Gregory's work with that of his great master, Origen, his Eastern contemporaries, and his Western counterpart, Augustine, the book shows Gregory to be the most outstanding example of the Origenist Trinitarian tradition of fourth‐century Asia Minor. Gregory offered the most powerful and comprehensive Trinitarian doctrine of his age from a distinctively Eastern point of view, largely independent of the work of Athanasius, while also representing the interests of Damasus of Rome and the Italian bishops as the leading pro‐Nicene theologian at the heart of the Eastern empire—a fact which sharply qualifies the long‐accepted dominance of the Athanasian‐Western paradigm as the normative standard for Trinitarian orthodoxy. Long eclipsed in twentieth‐century scholarship, Gregory's doctrine is now brought into full view as the major Greek authority on the Trinity and one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church.

Possidius, the bishop of Calama, was a life-long friend of St. Augustine's and best known for writing a biography of the bishop of Hippo, the Vita Augustini. This book analyzes both the biography and the legally-oriented career of Possidius to illustrate how active Augustine's colleagues were in soliciting imperial support against their religious competitors and to show just how often Augustine's close friends disagreed with him on important matters of law, coercion, and diplomacy. It is still widely asserted by scholars that St. Augustine dominated the theological landscape of North Africa, but this study demonstrates how often he was, in fact, singular and isolated in his beliefs.

Rather than constituting a break with his Platonism, Augustine's doctrines of grace and free will are formed from the beginning by Platonist conceptions of happiness, wisdom, intellect, virtue, purification, conversion, faith, and love. Divine grace is inner help for the will, and our need for it expands “outward” over the course of Augustine's career, being required originally for attaining the happiness of wisdom (i.e., the intellectual vision of God), then for rightly ordered love (i.e., charity), and eventually for Christian faith. Reading the apostle Paul, Augustine emphasizes the difficulty of willing and loving the good, and eventually concludes that even the human choice to believe depends on grace, though this comes to us in the external words of a “suitable call,” which does not directly change the will from within. However, in his later polemics against Pelagianism, Augustine reconceives grace as wholly inward, a divine inner teaching that turns our will and causes us to believe. Since God foresees how he will give the gift of grace, this raises questions of predestination and especially election: why does God choose to bring some people rather than others to conversion, faith, and ultimate salvation? A more biblical and external doctrine of election, in which the chosen people are a blessing for those outside them, would avoid the anxieties of Augustine's doctrine of predestination.

Though understandably overshadowed by Augustine’s preeminence in the West, Ambrose is a doctor of the Catholic Church and an important patristic authority for the Middle Ages and Reformation, especially in moral theology. Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue argues that Ambrose of Milan’s theological commitments, particularly his understanding of the Christian’s participation in God’s saving economy through baptism, are foundational for his virtue theory laid out in his catechetical and other pastoral writings. While he holds a high regard for classical and Hellenistic views of virtue, Ambrose insists that the Christian is able to attain the highest ideal of virtue taught by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This is possible because the Christian has received the transformative grace of baptism that allows the Christian to participate in the new creation inaugurated by Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. This book explores Ambrose’s understanding of this grace and how it frees the Christian to live the virtuous life. The argument is laid out in two parts. In Part I, the book examines Ambrose’s understanding of human nature and the effects of sin upon that nature. Central to this Part is the question of Ambrose’s understanding of the right relationship of soul and body as presented in Ambrose’s repeated appeal to Paul’s words, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). Part II lays out Ambrose’s account of baptism as the sacrament of justification and regeneration (sacramental and proleptic participation in the renewal of human nature in the resurrection). Ultimately, Ambrose’s account of the efficacy of baptism rests upon his Christology and pneumatology. The final chapters explain how Ambrose’s accounts of Christ and the Holy Spirit are foundational to his view of the grace that liberates the soul from the corruption of concupiscence.

Best known today as one of the earliest critics of John Locke, John Norris (1657-1711) incorporated ideas of Augustine, Malebranche, Plato, the Cambridge Platonists, and the scholastics into an original synthesis that was highly influential on the philosophy and theology of his day. This book presents a study of this unjustly neglected thinker, and the different perspectives he offers on this seminal period in philosophical history.

The heart of this book is a reading of the letters of Paulinus of Nola, aristocratic convert to Christianity of the late fourth‐century, and his correspondents, most notably St Augustine of Hippo. We begin with an analysis of letter writing in late antiquity; we investigate the letters as traces of fuller historical events, emphasize the importance of the letter carriers, and conclude that the letters have a sacramental function. The notion of spiritual community created and sustained by the letters is explored through discussions of Christian friendship, and of the patterns of imagistic thought which facilitate the spiritual interpretation of mundane events. Finally, we demonstrate how Paulinus’ notion of spiritual community leads to a novel conception of the self as truly relational. The impact of these letters, and of the epistolary mode, on the formation of Christian ways of life and thought is extraordinary.

Having been at the centre of a century long debate which cast doubt on the nature of Augustine’s conversion, one might assume that Augustine’s early works (386-96) have now been rescued and given their rightful place. This book suggests that these are now threatened by an equally destructive trend in Augustine scholarship, which, over the last fifty years, has become an almost unquestioned norm of interpretation. This is the idea, fatefully and poignantly depicted by Peter Brown in the chapter of his seminal biography entitled The Lost Future, that the early optimistic and philosophical Augustine was dramatically transformed into the mature, pessimistic theologian of the Fall, original sin, and grace by his reading of Paul in the mid-390s. This interpretation of the first decade of Augustine’s life has since become such an idée fixe in scholarly as well as popular accounts, leaving two very different Augustines: one, the young convert, fired to pursue Wisdom by an optimistic confidence in the rational disciplines of the liberal arts, human free will, and a glorious ideal of perfection; the other, the older and wiser bishop of Hippo, convinced of human fallen ness and of the need for grace to will or to do any good work. This book argues that in order to do justice to Augustine’s conversion, to his early theology and understanding of the Christian life, and to the early works themselves, such caricatures must be resisted. It seeks to demonstrate that there is a fundamental continuity in Augustine’s thought, which does not undergo any dramatic change when he re-reads Paul in the 390s; that there is only one Augustine, for whom human weakness and divine grace were the central axes of his Christian faith and life from the very beginning.

This book examines the formation of the Christian ascetic tradition in the western Roman Empire during the period of the barbarian invasions, c.400–600. In an aggressively competitive political context, one of the most articulate claims to power was made, paradoxically, by men who had renounced ‘the world’, committing themselves to a life of spiritual discipline in the hope of gaining entry to an otherworldly kingdom. Often dismissed as mere fanaticism or open hypocrisy, the language of ascetic authority, the book shows, was both carefully honed and well understood in the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean. It charts the development of this new moral rhetoric by abbots, teachers, and bishops from the time of Augustine of Hippo to that of St Benedict and Gregory the Great.

This book takes its cue from Augustine's theory of the liberal arts to explore the larger question of how the Bible became the focus of medieval culture in the West. Augustine himself became increasingly aware that an ambivalent attitude towards knowledge and learning was inherent in Christianity. By facing the intellectual challenge posed by this tension he arrived at a new theory of how to interpret the Bible correctly. One of the topics investigated here is Augustine's changing relationship with the ‘disciplines’ as he moved from an attempt at their Christianisation (in the philosophical dialogues of Cassiciacum) to a radical reshaping of them within a Christian world-view (in the De Doctrina Christiana and Confessions). The book also considers the factors that prompted and facilitated his change of perspective and the ways in which Augustine's evolving theory reflected contemporary trends in Christian pedagogy.

In the later years of the fourth century the monk Jovinian was condemned at Rome and Milan for teaching that all baptized Christians were equal in God's sight and that all would receive an equal reward in heaven regardless of ascetic merit. This book is the first study in English devoted to Jovinian and the controversy sparked by his teaching. In chapter 1 I offer a reconstruction of Jovinian's teaching, uncovering its strong anti‐heretical emphases, exposing its biblical foundations, and relating it to fourth‐century baptismal practice. Subsequent chapters place Jovinian in a variety of contexts: the rise of a Christian aristocracy in the fourth century (chapter 2); the development of an anti‐heretical tradition in the first three centuries (chapter 3); the proliferation of this heresiological discourse in the fourth century (chapter 4); and the history of Marian theology, especially on the matter of Mary's perpetual virginity (chapter 5). In the final two chapters I distinguish the different approaches to marriage, celibacy, and clerical life evinced by Jovinian's opponents (chapter 6), and highlight the ways in which one of these opponents, Jerome, became the object of criticism and accusations of heresy. If there is a single conclusion to be drawn from this study, it is that Jovinian stood much closer to the mainstream of the Christian tradition than previous critics (including his ancient opponents) allowed.